The sped-up HD 7970 GHz edition came out last month to knock down the GTX 680 from the gaming performance throne. Now, and before another top level announcement, the rest of the high end line up received price adjustments to further attack Nvidia gamers' holdout.

Three weeks ago, the 1050 MHz – in perpetually switched on Turbo mode – HD 7970 GHz edition officially broke through the 4 TFLOPs FP per GPU – or any other kind of processor – barrier, and also, with sped up GPU, memory and drivers – dethroned the Nvidia GTX 680 from the gaming performance leadership. While now we await the dual GPU HD 7990 offering to 'handle' the Nvidia GTX 690, AMD is targeting the rest of the high end gamers by reducing the MSRP prices on the rest of the high end line up as of Monday July 16th.

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 will come down to $429 USD, and the AMD Radeon HD 7950 will be available for $349 USD. Both will be bundled with the Three-for-Free promotion, getting three free DirectX® 11 games for free (a $100 value) with the purchase of any AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 Series product. One key benefit here is, of course, getting 3 GB of graphics memory that the competition doesn't have, for play at maximum resolutions or details. Also, the more mainstream AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition will now be available for $299 USD, inclusive of a free copy of DiRT Showdown (a $50 value).

With this move, the standard GTX 670/680 cards will feel increased pressure, as well as the impending GTX 660 next month, but the real icing on the cake would be the early launch of Sea Islands at the year end, before Nvidia can bring in the big die GK110 into consumer cards.